Malevich - Black Circle

The Everyday in Art

The presence in contemporary art of everyday, domestic objects such as a bed is now a commonplace of contemporary art, even if contemporary critics rarely ask whose everyday domesticity might be re/presented. Many of life's key experiences and rites of passage — being born, sleeping, dreaming, having sex, giving birth, and dying — happen in bed.

Rachel Whiteread made numerous bed pieces which she placed on the floor, inviting yet denying rest, cots by Permindar Kaur or Mona Hatoum, Richard Hamilton's brutal Treatment Room of 1984 (Arts Council Collection, London, recently exhibited in Protest and Survive at the Whitechapel Art Gallery) or Bill Viola's Science of the Heart of 1983 (shown in Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery) play on, prey on, the oscillations between life and death, the body's presence and absence. None have the comforts usually associated with the bed in consumer culture of the 1980s and 1990s with its boom in home decoration and plethora of styles from the minimalist to the ornate. One of Sarah Lucas's most complex pieces about sexuality and sexual difference is Au Naturel of 1994 in which a sagging, stained mattress is propped up against a wall. Impossible to sleep or rest upon, its surface is interrupted the objects placed upon it: a bucket, melons and a cucumber. So long a stage for the performance of the female nude, upturned the mattress becomes the site for the play of fantasies and cultural representations as the artist's trades with her audiences the crude sexual stereotypes in circulation in contemporary culture.

A Country Refuge

The project was a collaboration born of a conversation about the mutual feelings of exposure and vulnerability Kirsten and I felt whilst on a drawing assignment to the rocky headland on the south coast of Skye a few weeks ago.

On facing the elements, unprotected and alone, we felt an overwhelming desire to find shelter, warmth and protection, and as there was none available, we decided to build our own safe haven, using the only materials we had available, those which existed naturally on the Island; branches, twigs, grass and rocks.

This work stems from a common interest in the theme of human vulnerability and the desire to protect, encase and self-preserve that comes instinctively to us. The built environment exists to give people places in which they can find shelter, thus in the natural environment we must, like animals, find a way to create shelter for ourselves.

Sadly we ran out of time so the shelter remains unfinished, however, for me, it has taken on a new character as a drawing in space, a natural curiosity that I hope future passers by will take a moment to ponder upon. Had the shelter been completed, our idea was that in it's very making, it would be unmade, the structure flowing from the lines of the rockface becoming an extension of the natural environment from which it arose from.

Not a word was spoke between us, there was little risk involved
Everything up to that point had been left unresolved.
Try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Thank you Bob Dylan

The Everyday and the Extraordinary

Sunday Afternoon in the Queen of Parks

Following all that heavy stuff about the economy and our world in crisis I thought it prudent to remember that some things are free, nature is beautiful, and for the paltry cost of a pencil and a piece of paper, a lovely afternoon can be spent, close to idle, whiling away the day drawing in the park.

To Let

A Felt Covered Solution for a New Crisis

Joseph Beuys, Infiltration homogen für Konzertflügel (Infiltration Homogen for Grand Piano), 1966

Beuys died three years before the reunification of Germany, in a time that is no longer our time. And history has changed the significance of his work. Freed from his overbearing presence, his art reveals its fullness. In his lifetime Beuys was the unequivocal author of his art, telling people, for better or worse, what it was. Now, his assemblages have to find their own place, without him to explain them.

Because Beuys is a German artist, it is impossible not to see the wounds of history everywhere, with a surpassing melancholy that dwarfs his attempts to commit his sculpture to an optimistic democratic politics. Beuys hoped his lumps of fat spoke of fluidity and progressive change. In fact, they are blocks of rancid yellow memory - fat from Germany.

The first Beuys I ever saw was at the Georges Pompidou Centre: a grand piano smothered in grey felt, with a red cross sewn on it. It struck me as tragic, and it still does. The piano is German culture, the heritage of Beethoven, sealed now inside felt, with an ambulance sign - damaged, wounded, recuperating. It is the sculptural equivalent of the sanatorium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

When I tried to find out more about Beuys, I was baffled. The felt swaddling the piano, according to Beuys, was meant to heal it, to save it. Yet this efficacious magic doesn't actually form part of the piano's aesthetic impact. There is no sense of redemption - just of sickness. Now I realise it doesn't matter what Beuys said; probably at some level he knew he was whistling in the dark when he claimed his art was upbeat and spiritually transfiguring, when really it is shockingly lumpen, and macabre.